Multiculturalism doesn’t make
vibrant communities
but defensive ones.

by Steve Sailer

[COMMENT: My thoughts -- in a non-Biblical society, this
disintegration of trust will always follow on multiculturalism. But in a
truly Biblical culture, in a Christ-centered society, mixing of races does not lead there. See comments
on
legitimate pluralism.

The pseudo-tolerance of multiculturalism leads in the end,
always, to totalitarianism because the collapse of truth scuttles the honesty of
the public arena. There is no way any longer to adjudicate between
conflicting opinions. Conflicting opinions are not gotten rid of with
multiculturalism, they are only submerged to work in the dark -- which is just
where the proponents of multiculturalism want them. These people wantyou to relativize your views so that you will not defend them. That
leaves them free, under cover, to insert their views.And then the
best manipulator gets the reins of power. Tyranny. Eternal vigilance
is still the price of freedom.

America is the prime example of the
possibilities for honest
legitimate pluralism to work. But our multiculturalists are
destroying it. When truth goes, so does trust, and true pluralism is built
on objective truth, not the nonsense of relative truth. Multiculturalism
is always defensive because only truth can set us free. Relative truth
ensnares us.

Diversity can be tolerated only when the basics are agreed
upon. Every society, in other words, requires a
one-religion basis in order to keep
form Balkanizing. But the Biblical view is that that unity must be
attained, as God invites, by "Come, let us reason together...," i.e., as per the
America Constitutional way. Honest pluralism.

For a powerful example of how true multiculturalism works, how
people across races and political divides, such as Jews and Palestinians, learn
to live with and love each other, see Forbidden Peace, put out by the Jews for
Jesus. Call Purple Pomegranate Productions, 877-4-MESSIAH

Only in Jesus could this happen. This is the unity for
which Jesus prayed in John 17. It is the unity shown by the early
Christians in the face of Rome, the unity which only God can supply and which
will thus convince the world that Jesus comes from the Father.

To say this is thought provoking is to shortchange the
phrase.
*******************************************************
Fragmented Future

In the presence of [ethnic] diversity, we hunker
down. We act like
turtles. The effect of diversity is worse than had been imagined. And it’s
not just that we don’t trust people who are not like us. In diverse
communities, we don’t trust people who do look like us.
—Harvard professor Robert D. Putnam

It was one of the more irony-laden
incidents in the history of celebrity
social scientists. While in Sweden to receive a $50,000 academic prize as
political science professor of the year, Harvard’s Robert D. Putnam, a
former Carter administration official who made his reputation writing about
the decline of social trust in America in his bestseller Bowling Alone,
confessed to Financial Times columnist John Lloyd that his latest research
discovery—that ethnic diversity decreases trust and co-operation in
communities—was so explosive that for the last half decade he hadn’t dared
announce it “until he could develop proposals to compensate for the negative
effects of diversity, saying it ‘would have been irresponsible to publish
without that.’”

In a column headlined “Harvard study paints bleak picture of ethnic
diversity,” Lloyd summarized the results of the largest study ever of “civic
engagement,” a survey of 26,200 people in 40 American communities:

When the data were adjusted for class, income and other factors, they
showed that the more people of different races lived in the same community,
the greater the loss of trust. ‘They don’t trust the local mayor, they don’t
trust the local paper, they don’t trust other people and they don’t trust
institutions,’ said Prof Putnam. ‘The only thing there’s more of is protest
marches and TV watching.’

As if to prove his own point that diversity creates minefields of mistrust,
Putnam later protested to the Harvard Crimson that the Financial Times essay
left him feeling betrayed, calling it “by two degrees of magnitude, the
worst experience I have ever had with the media.” To Putnam’s horror,
hundreds of “racists and anti-immigrant activists” sent him e-mails
congratulating him for finally coming clean about his findings.

Lloyd stoutly stood by his reporting, and Putnam couldn’t cite any mistakes
of fact, just a failure to accentuate the positive. It was “almost
criminal,” Putnam grumbled, that Lloyd had not sufficiently emphasized the
spin that he had spent five years concocting. Yet considering the quality of
Putnam’s talking points that Lloyd did pass on, perhaps the journalist was
being merciful in not giving the professor more rope with which to hang
himself. For example, Putnam’s line—“What we shouldn’t do is to say that
they [immigrants] should be more like us. We should construct a new
us”—sounds like a weak parody of Bertolt Brecht’s parody of Communist
propaganda after the failed 1953 uprising against the East German puppet
regime: “Would it not be easier for the government to dissolve the people
and elect another?”

Before Putnam hid his study away, his research had appeared on March 1, 2001
in a Los Angeles Times article entitled “Love Thy Neighbor? Not in L.A.”
Reporter Peter Y. Hong recounted, “Those who live in more homogeneous
places, such as New Hampshire, Montana or Lewiston, Maine, do more with
friends and are more involved in community affairs or politics than
residents of more cosmopolitan areas, the study said.”

Putnam’s discovery is hardly shocking to anyone who has tried to organize a
civic betterment project in a multi-ethnic neighborhood. My wife and I lived
for 12 years in Chicago’s Uptown district, which claims to be the most
diverse two square miles in America, with about 100 different languages
being spoken. She helped launch a neighborhood drive to repair the
dilapidated playlot across the street. To get Mayor Daley’s administration
to chip in, we needed to raise matching funds and sign up volunteer
laborers.

This kind of Robert D. Putnam-endorsed good citizenship proved difficult in
Uptown, however, precisely because of its remarkable diversity. The most
obvious stumbling block was that it’s hard to talk neighbors into donating
money or time if they don’t speak the same language as you. Then there’s the
fundamental difficulty of making multiculturalism work—namely, multiple
cultures. Getting Koreans, Russians, Mexicans, Nigerians, and Assyrians
(Christian Iraqis) to agree on how to landscape a park is harder than
fostering consensus among people who all grew up with the same mental
picture of what a park should look like. For example, Russian women like to
sunbathe. But most of the immigrant ladies from more southerly countries
stick to the shade, since their cultures discriminate in favor of
fairer-skinned women. So do you plant a lot of shade trees or not?

The high crime rate didn’t help either. The affluent South Vietnamese
merchants from the nearby Little Saigon district showed scant enthusiasm for
sending their small children to play in a park that would also be used by
large black kids from the local public-housing project.

Exotic inter-immigrant hatreds also got in the way. The Eritreans and
Ethiopians are both slender, elegant-looking brown people with thin Arab
noses, who appear identical to undiscerning American eyes. But their
compatriots in the Horn of Africa were fighting a vicious war.

Finally, most of the immigrants, with the possible exception of the
Eritreans, came from countries where only a chump would trust neighbors he
wasn’t related to, much less count on the government for an even break. If
the South Vietnamese, for example, had been less clannish and more ready to
sacrifice for the national good in 1964-75, they wouldn’t be so proficient
at running family-owned restaurants on Argyle Street today. But they might
still have their own country.

In the end, boring old middle-class, English-speaking, native-born Americans
(mostly white, but with some black-white couples) did the bulk of the work.
When the ordeal of organizing was over, everybody seemed to give up on
trying to bring Uptown together for civic improvement for the rest of the
decade.

The importance of co-operativeness has fallen in and out of intellectual
fashion over the centuries. An early advocate of the role of cohesion in
history’s cycles was the 14th-century Arab statesman and scholar Ibn
Khaldun, who documented that North African dynasties typically began as
desert tribes poor in everything but what he termed asabiya or social
solidarity. Their willingness to sacrifice for each other made them
formidable in battle. But once they conquered a civilized state along the
coast, the inevitable growth in inequality began to sap their asabiya, until
after several generations their growing fractiousness allowed another
cohesive clan to emerge from the desert and overthrow them.

Recently, Princeton biologist Peter Turchin has extended Ibn Khaldun’s
analysis in a disquieting direction, pointing out that nothing generates
asabiya like having a common enemy. Turchin notes that powerful states arise
mostly on ethnic frontiers, where conflicts with very different peoples
persuade co-ethnics to overcome their minor differences and all hang
together, or assuredly they would all hang separately. Thus the German
heartland remained divided up among numerous squabbling principalities until
1870. Meanwhile, powerful German kingdoms emerged on Prussia’s border with
the Balts and Slavs and Austria’s border with the Slavs and Magyars.

Similarly, the 13 American colonies came together by fighting first the
French and Indians, then the British. In this century, two world wars helped
forge from the heavy immigration of 1890 to 1924 what Putnam calls the “long
civic generation” that reached its peak in the 1940s and ’50s.

Half a millennium after Ibn Khaldun, Alexis de Tocqueville famously
attributed much of America’s success to its “forever forming associations.
There are not only commercial and industrial associations in which all take
part, but others of a thousand different types—religious, moral, serious,
futile, very general and very limited, immensely large and very minute.
Nothing, in my view, deserves more attention than the intellectual and moral
associations in America.”

The transformation of economics into a technical rather than empirical field
discouraged hard thinking about co-operation. It was much simpler to create
mathematical models based on the assumption that rational individual
self-interest drove human behavior, even though that perspective could
hardly explain such vast events as the First World War, that abattoir of
asabiya.

In the 1990s, the importance of civil society was widely talked up as
crucial in transitioning post-Soviet states away from totalitarianism, but
the free-market economists’ prescription of “shock therapy” prevailed
disastrously in Russia, as gangsters looted the nations’ assets.

An important contribution to the scholarly revival came in Francis
Fukuyama’s 1995 book Trust: The Social Virtues & the Creation of Prosperity.
Fukuyama raised the hot-potato issue that Americans, Northwestern Europeans,
and Japanese tend to work together well to create huge corporations, while
the companies of other advanced countries, such as Italy and Taiwan, can
seldom grow beyond family firms. (As Luigi Barzini remarked in The Italians,
only a fool would be a minority shareholder in Sicily, so nobody is one.)
Fukuyama prudently ignored, though, the large swaths of the world that are
low both in trust and technology, such as Africa, Latin America, and the
Middle East.

As an economics major and libertarian fellow-traveler in the late 1970s, I
assumed that individualism made America great. But a couple of trips south
of the border raised questions. Venturing onto a Buenos Aires freeway in
1978, I discovered a carnival of rugged individualists. Back home in Los
Angeles, everybody drove between the lane-markers painted on the pavement,
but only about one in three Argentineans followed that custom. Another third
straddled the stripes, apparently convinced that the idiots driving between
the lines were unleashing vehicular chaos. And the final third ignored the
maricón lanes altogether and drove wherever they wanted.

The next year, I was sitting on an Acapulco beach with some college friends,
trying to shoo away peddlers. When we tried to brush off one especially
persistent drug dealer by claiming we had no cash, he whipped out his
credit-card machine, which was impressively enterprising for the 1970s. That
set me thinking about why we Americans were luxuriating on the Mexicans’
beach instead of vice-versa. Clearly, the individual entrepreneurs pestering
us were at least as hardworking and ambitious as we were. Mexico’s economic
shortcoming had to be its corrupt and feckless large organizations. Mexicans
didn’t seem to team up well beyond family-scale.

In America, you don’t need to belong to a family-based mafia for protection
because the state will enforce your contracts with some degree of equality
before the law. In Mexico, though, as former New York Times correspondent
Alan Riding wrote in his 1984 bestseller Distant Neighbors: A Portrait of
the Mexicans, “Public life could be defined as the abuse of power to achieve
wealth and the abuse of wealth to achieve power.” Anyone outside the
extended family is assumed to have predatory intentions, which explains the
famous warmth and solidarity of Mexican families. “Mexicans need few
friends,” Riding observed, “because they have many relatives.”

Mexico is a notoriously low-trust culture and a notoriously unequal one. The
great traveler Alexander von Humboldt observed two centuries ago, in words
that are arguably still true, “Mexico is the country of inequality. Perhaps
nowhere in the world is there a more horrendous distribution of wealth,
civilization, cultivation of land, and population.” Jorge G. Castañeda,
Vicente Fox’s first foreign minister, noted the ethnic substratum of
Mexico’s disparities in 1995:

The business or intellectual elites of the nation tend to be white
(there are still exceptions, but they are becoming more scarce with the
years). By the 1980s, Mexico was once again a country of three nations: the
criollo minority of elites and the upper-middle class, living in style and
affluence; the huge, poor, mestizo majority; and the utterly destitute
minority of what in colonial times was called the Republic of Indians…

Castañeda pointed out, “These divisions partly explain why Mexico is as
violent and unruly, as surprising and unfathomable as it has always prided
itself on being. The pervasiveness of the violence was obfuscated for years
by the fact that much of it was generally directed by the state and the
elites against society and the masses, not the other way around. The current
rash of violence by society against the state and elites is simply a
retargeting.”

These deep-rooted Mexican attitudes largely account for why, in Putnam’s
“Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey,” Los Angeles ended up looking a
lot like it did in the Oscar-winning movie “Crash.” I once asked a Hollywood
agent why there are so many brother acts among filmmakers these days, such
as the Coens, Wachowskis, Farrellys, and Wayans. “Who else can you trust?”
he shrugged.

But what primarily drove down L.A.’s rating in Putnam’s 130-question survey
were the high levels of distrust displayed by Hispanics. While no more than
12 percent of L.A.’s whites said they trusted other races “only a little or
not at all,” 37 percent of L.A.’s Latinos distrusted whites. And whites were
the most reliable in Hispanic eyes. Forty percent of Latinos doubted Asians,
43 percent distrusted other Hispanics, and 54 percent were anxious about
blacks.

Some of this white-Hispanic difference stems merely from Latinos’ failure to
tell politically correct lies to the researchers about how much they trust
other races. Yet the L.A. survey results also reflect a very real and
deleterious lack of co-operativeness and social capital among Latinos. As
columnist Gregory Rodriguez stated in the L.A. Times: “In Los Angeles, home
to more Mexicans than any other city in the U.S., there is not one ethnic
Mexican hospital, college, cemetery, or broad-based charity.”

Since they seldom self-organize beyond the extended family, Los Angeles’s
millions of Mexican-Americans make strangely little contribution to local
civic and artistic life. L.A. is awash in underemployed creative talent who
occupy their abundant spare time putting on plays, constructing spectacular
haunted houses each Halloween, and otherwise trying to attract Jerry
Bruckheimer’s attention. Yet there is little overlap between the enormous
entertainment industry and the huge Mexican-American community.

In late October, I pored over the 64-page Sunday Calendar section of the
L.A. Times, which listed a thousand or more upcoming cultural events. I
found just seven that were clearly organized by Latinos. While it’s a
journalistic cliché to describe Mexican-American neighborhoods as “vibrant,”
they aren’t.

Some of this lack of social capital is class-related—Miami indeed has a
vibrant Hispanic culture, but it’s anomalous because it attracts Latin
America’s affluent and educated. In contrast, Los Angeles is a
representative harbinger of America’s future because it imports peasants and
laborers.

It’s often assumed that low-trust societies can be fixed just by everyone
deciding to trust each other more. But that can only work if people become
not just more trusting but more trustworthy.

Although most Asian-Americans originate in low-trust cultures centered
around the family, they typically adapt well to middle-class American life
because their high degree of honesty makes them dependable neighbors and
co-workers. Hispanics in America, in contrast, have a relatively high crime
rate—while their imprisonment rate is less than half that of blacks, it is
2.9 times worse than that of whites and 13 times that of Asians. Alarmingly,
the Latino crime rate goes up after the immigrant generation, suggesting a
troubling future. While many American-born Hispanics assimilate into the
middle class, others descend into the gang-ridden underclass. Further, the
illegitimacy rate has reached 48 percent among Hispanics (versus 25 percent
among whites), and it’s higher among Mexican-Americans born here than among
newcomers from Mexico.

The problems caused by diversity can be partly ameliorated, but the handful
of techniques that actually work generally appall liberal intellectuals, so
we hear about them only when they come under attack.

Putnam points out one success story but draws an unsophisticated lesson: “I
think we can do a lot to push change along more rapidly. There was a lot of
racial tension around the time of the Vietnam War. Now, polls show that US
military personnel have many more friendships across ethnic lines than
civilians. If officers were told they wouldn’t make colonel if they were
seen to discriminate, they changed.”

Imposing martial law on the rest of America might prove impractical,
however. And negative sanctions can hardly account fully for the growth of
positive relationships within the military.

One important aspect that Putnam ignores is the military’s relentless use of
IQ tests. From 1992-2004, the military accepted almost no applicants for
enlistment who scored below the 30th percentile on the Armed Forces
Qualification Test. This eliminated within the ranks the majority of the IQ
gap that causes so much discord in civilian America. Contra John Kerry,
enlistees of all races averaged above the national mean in IQ: white
recruits scored 107, Hispanics 103, and blacks 102.

Another untold story is the beneficial effect on race relations of the
growth of Christian fundamentalism. Among soldiers and college football
players, for instance, co-operation between the races is up due to an
increased emphasis on a common transracial identity as Christians. According
to military correspondent Robert D. Kaplan of The Atlantic, “The rise of
Christian evangelicalism had helped stop the indiscipline of the Vietnam-era
Army.” And that has helped build bridges among the races. Military
sociologists Charles C. Moskos and John Sibley Butler wrote in All That We
Can Be: Black Leadership and Racial Integration the Army Way, “Perhaps the
most vivid example of the ‘blackening’ of enlisted culture is seen in
religion. Black Pentecostal congregations have also begun to influence the
style of worship in mainstream Protestant services in post chapels. Sunday
worship in the Army finds both the congregation and the spirit of the
service racially integrated.”

Similarly, it’s now common to see college football coaches leading their
teams in prayer. Fisher DeBerry, the outstanding coach of the Air Force
Academy, who has led players with no hope of making the NFL to a record of
169-108-1, hung a banner in the locker room bearing the Fellowship of
Christian Athletes’ Competitor’s Creed, which begins, “I am a Christian
first and last.” When the administration found out, he was asked to take it
down.

Because policymakers almost certainly won’t do what it would take to
alleviate the harms caused by diversity—indeed, they won’t even talk
honestly about what would have to be done—it’s crazy to exacerbate the
problem through more mass immigration. As the issue of co-operation becomes
ever more pressing, the quality of intellectual discourse on the topic
declines—as Putnam’s self-censorship revealed—precisely because of a lack of
trust due to the mounting political power of “the diverse” to punish frank
discussion.
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